Why the Cloud is a Hotel’s Ultimate Security Blanket
Even in today’s ultra-high-tech world, there’s significant debate over whether locally-hosted or cloud files are more secure, convenient, or cost-effective for your hotel. Hotel owners have long been hesitant to adopt new technology, and many feel that keeping data off-site makes it more vulnerable to attack or theft.
In fact, the opposite is true. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic upheaval last year showed us that business practices can be forced to change at the drop of a hat, and nothing prepares a modern business for adversity like cloud services. Here’s why cloud services are the best way to bring peace of mind to your hotel.
Resilience and Adaptability
When the pandemic hit, many businesses were completely upended. Millions of workers started working from home, business travel ground to a halt, and managers had to determine how to service their guests without risking their health. Cloud-based services helped businesses to stay in communication, keep their operations running, and stay afloat.
The same is true in the case of a disaster. If something should happen to the physical server where your data is stored, a cloud backup will be the difference between rapid recovery and total loss.
Protection Against Cyber Attacks
Cybersecurity is one of a business’s top priorities in years to come, with the cost of cybercrimes totaling in the trillions of dollars every year. One of the most common forms of cyber attack is ransomware, wherein data is encrypted and kept for ransom until the target pays a significant sum of money to have it unencrypted.
If you have a complete and regular cloud backup of your data, however, ransomware is much less of a threat. Instead of paying to have your data restored, you can simply delete and restore it from your backup.
Other Cloud Benefits
Cloud phone systems also bring significant benefits to your hotel’s daily operations that are worth considering:
- Cost: cloud services are almost always cheaper in the long run than the costs of maintaining, servicing, and upgrading on-site hardware.
- Security: there are security risks to both on-premises and cloud-hosted services, and keeping your data on the premises doesn’t necessarily make it any safer. Large cloud services often have much higher budgets than individual hotels, so they can afford much better security measures.
- Compliance: keeping up with new regulations around handling sensitive guest information is crucial, but cloud services are more than capable of meeting the same security standards of any local hotel system.
There’s an old saying that “the cloud is just someone else’s computer,” designed to cast doubt on the security and reliability of cloud-hosted storage and software. But in this day and age, the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the downsides for almost every hotel, in addition to providing added security in the case of a significant emergency or disaster. If you’re ready to talk about how cloud storage can benefit your hotel, start a conversation with Phonesuite today.
